Unknown Speaker (8:57)
Okay, I have two thoughts. Jason's talk was amazing and I want her boots. That was super awesome. So I'll be a little bit boring. I'll talk about science and behavior and whatnot. And to kick us off, I want to talk about how as behavioral scientists, we're always thinking about all the ways that as humans we act irrationally. And I'll start with my own go to irrational behavior. I suffer from what's called planning fallacy. If you invite me to an event that starts at 7:00, I'll probably show up at 9. Probably due to my Persian heritage, I was actually late to my own wedding. Yes, that is true. My husband was like, not so happy. Now maybe I'm irrational, but I'm sure you guys in the crowd are perfectly rational. But just in case, we're going to do a little survey. So I want you to raise your hand for me. And by the way, remember, I study you for a living so I know what happens. Raise your hand for me if you have generally a pretty good idea of what it takes to be healthy, eat your fruits and vegetables, exercise a few times a week, get your eight hours of sleep. Awesome. Keep those hands raised. Please drop them if you have ever been guilty of one of these things that I'm going to mention. You binge watched Netflix and didn't get your eight hours of sleep. Oh, my God, that's the whole crowd. Okay. Actually, there's like three people left. Okay, we'll keep going. You grabbed that sweet pastry at breakfast instead of the yogurt. Okay. No, they're still perfect. Here. You missed your morning workout because you slept in for the conference. All right, so there seems to be like two perfectly rational people in this room. I love it. What this example in health illustrates is something that hopefully we can all relate to. That there's basically a gap between what we know we should do. Eat our fruits and vegetables, exercise, get our sleep, and what we actually end up doing. Binge watching Netflix, skipping our morning workout, et cetera. It's enclosing this gap that behavioral science really shines. Because as behavioral scientists, we take into account that people's emotions, our environment, whether it's a physical one like the one we're in today, or a digital one that our customers and ourselves experience online and social factors. What are all the other people in this room doing? What are your peers doing? What are people in the industry doing? All influence our behaviors and our actions. And so we lovingly like to say that we think of our users on the other side and ourselves a bit more like Homer Simpson. We have biases and mental shortcuts and heuristics that lead us to the way that we make decisions. And we're not perfectly rational like Spock. But here's the challenge that we see in marketing our products and solutions. When we don't know what to do, we have a tendency to fall back and give people more information in our marketing and more choices in our product, and then expect a behavior. Do you think that if I gave you a bunch of pamphlets on the efficacy of exercise, that's what would get you out of bed or getting sleep? It would get you to click and turn off the Netflix. Sometimes, maybe, but not all the time. We're marketing in a digital age, but we've forgotten that we're relying on humans brains that hasn't really evolved in more than 200,000 years. Now, here's the good news. If we can find a way to understand all the ways that people are predictably irrational and document through research all the ways that we make irrational decisions, then we can actually take advantage of that and lovingly nudge our users and ourselves towards behaviors that are in our best interest and towards marketing our products and solutions in a much more effective way. Okay, I said all of that and I know what you're thinking, but really, our users are much more like Spock because they're executives and they're engineers. And so I put Homer in a suit for you and I was like, okay, I have to put AI in this somehow. And by the way, side note, I'd like to propose that anybody that says AI in this conference, we all jump down and do 10 pushups because AI might take our jobs, but at least we can look good at the end of the day. I went to ChatGPT and I'm like, okay, give me what are the top cognitive biases in B2B decision making? And it gave me 10. Actually, it gave me 20 and more. So if you have any doubts that we don't have biases in a B2B context, I like to offer things like confirmation bias, where we basically just look and search for information that just simply confirms our pre existing beliefs. This might be why we have such a political divide in this country. Or how about the herding effect? Have you ever noticed how the team and the company might herd around the opinions of the most senior people in the room? Right, okay. So hopefully, maybe I've convinced you a little bit that Homer Simpson exists in all of us, even if you are in suits and ties. Now, with that brief intro to behavioral science to really educate you, I'm not going to deliver a ton of content. We're going to actually play a game. We're going to play our science of design game, and I'm going to pair you in groups of two. I'd like to have you look at the table and find a person to pair with. We're going to do hopefully three rounds. I'm going to promise two rounds. And if they don't kick me off stage, we'll get to three rounds. We're going to be covering real life B2B marketing challenges that we've solved for our clients using behavioral science. And we're going to have you guys play with these concepts and hopefully by playing with these concepts, you'll start learning them. And by the way, there is some behavioral science in me having you play this game. I am trying to overcome, first of all, what's called your hindsight bias, which is if I simply come up here and show you a bunch of decks and a bunch of case studies, you'd be like, I could have done that myself. So I get you to play and maybe get it wrong, et cetera. Having guys talk with your teammate actually helps you improve cognition of the concepts that we're going to be covering today. That's a little bit of the behavioral science that's baked into our game. The game is going to be actually on your phones, on a mobile phone. I'm going to ask you just to wait when we go to the polling feature to pull up your phone and otherwise stay with your partner in conversation. I know I've got a phone I got to overcome here where you're not going into your phone and looking on LinkedIn, but I have full faith that your learning partner is going to help you overcome that desire to be on your phone today. So with that, do you have your learning partner? Are we good? Yes. Okay. I used to be a cycling instructor and yeah, I know when I wanted to get the crowd going, I'd have them like, hoot and holler. And I know it's a B2B context, but I'm going to get you guys to hoot and holler for every single round. And here's the situation. If you're not loud enough, I'm going to have to make you keep doing it again and again like a really annoying cycling instructor. So you might as well get it right. The first are we ready for round one? I will give you, on a scale of 1 to 10, that was about a 6.5. I'm going to ask one more time. I'd ideally like to get to like an 8.59. Are we ready for our first round? Yes. Okay, Here we go. First round. We are trying to increase B2B marketing adoption. Our client is a digital transformation consultancy. Largely what they do is they go into big Fortune 500 companies like Ford, et cetera, and then help bring digital solutions to their product portfolio. The challenge that you have as a marketeer is to figure out how do you increase adoption of these digital marketing services with B2B buyers at these enterprise companies? So their buyers are going to be chief innovation officers, chief technology officers, et cetera. And because we're scientists, we like to run experiments to understand what really happens. So we're going to run our experiment on LinkedIn across tens of thousands of actual buyers, our target audience in market. And we're going to be testing different messages to try to understand how to influence these buyers. So the first option is we go with what's called a loss frame message, or in behavioral science, it's part of what we call prevention messaging. And the general idea is that some Humans are much more motivated by preventing a negative outcome. So basically talking about what your product or solution protects me from or how I don't miss out on any information that's given in this conference. Second option is we go with what's called a gain framed message. So we actually talk about in behavioral science what we call promotion messaging. And the general idea here is because we're an innovation firm, let's focus on understanding how our solution can help our clients achieve more and what does our product enable them to do and how is it that I can maximize my learnings from this conference today? So if you're a promotion oriented person, you're going to respond more favorably to that, that frame of message. The third option is what I like to call keep it simple, stupid. Focus on clarity. It's one of the biggest problems that we see working with our clients in a B2B context is that they simply are not delivering the message clearly. So just focus on clearly defining the primary value prop of what you do. It's based on a complicated term. Leave it to scientists. We call it cognitive fluency. The general idea is that when we make things either through language or design or user experience, simple for people, it requires less mental work and it actually gets them motivated for that action. I'm going to very quickly explain the research that was done in the lab because I'm really hoping that you remember this one is really critical in B2B context. So they took a group of people, divided them in half, gave them the exact same set of instructions, and the only thing that they changed was the font. One as you see on the top is a simple font and the other is a cursive font. And they told them, tell us how much time you think it will take you to do these things. And people basically in the first scenario with a simple font, estimated 8 minutes. With just a cursive font, estimated 15 minutes. Why is this critical in a B2B context? Because when we overcomplicate talking about our solution, we make it feel to the user that using our solution is complicated and therefore they will be less likely to engage. So that's cognitive fluency. So back to your poll. I'm going to give you two minutes here to talk and I'm going to bring back our three options. So focus on a loss frame messaging, a gain frame messaging, or focus on the primary ballot prop with clarity. And off you go. All right, if you can hear me, clap your hands. If you can hear me, clap your hands. Okay, I was not a school teacher, but I figured. All right, cool. You guys ready to vote? So now I want you to flip your phones. Thank you so much for not being on your phones. And go ahead and cast your vote. Does anybody need the QR code? Yes, you do. Okay. Let's go back and give you a QR code here. All right. Votes cast? Yeah. All right, cool. Let's see what happened. Ha. I love it. Something really interesting happened that actually isn't the right answer. C what most of you got. Did you notice how I pre influenced you by talking about cognitive fluency a lot longer than the other concepts? That was actually not intentional, but that probably is something that led to that result. Let's talk about the answers. I'm going to go back here. Okay. Cognitive fluency or clarity on the primary value prop was our control condition. It was the client's best performing ad before we came along. When we came in and looked at what they were doing, they were actually using a lot of gain frame messaging in their website, in their marketing material. And intuitively that makes a ton of sense. And as marketeers, that is a default for us because we're typically bringing great innovative solutions to our clients where we think they can gain something out of using it. We weren't sure if this was the right frame, so we went out and talked to people, we talked to just a handful of their executives and something really interesting appeared where these people to us seemed very risk averse. They kept talking about how in the past, they've used solutions in the past and it's been highly disruptive. They haven't gotten good roi. And that led us to believe that we have a promotion prevention problem here where they are speaking to their audience in a promotion oriented way, but their audience is actually prevention oriented. So we ultimately put this actually out to test. We tested each of these concepts and the reason for that is because as scientists, we are firm believers on measuring real actual behavior where it happens on LinkedIn as opposed to pontificating on what might or might not be the answer. It turned out to be that in this scenario, the loss frame messaging that we were hearing in our qualitative interviews with executives actually held true at scale across tens of thousands of of CTOs, CIOs, et cetera. The reason this was really critical was because we now had quantifiable numbers to say we can go with the strategy of using loss frame messaging to gain adoption and notice. I want to call out something here. When I talk about loss frame messaging, it's not like doom and gloom, it's Very subtle. How do companies like Adidas, Microsoft and, and Ford. De Risk Innovation. That's it. And in the game frame, it's beat the competition that's going to appeal to somebody's promotion. So in reality the loss frame worked best and so you can see the results here. And so what did we do with that? We went back and redid all of their marketing, redid all of their messaging, infusing kind of this loss oriented message. I'm going to kind of pull out some things you see on their homepage. De Risk Innovation. Avoid revenue losses, prevent wasted money and damage to your reputation. Things that we knew were going to appeal to a prevention oriented person. And we ran the experiment now with all of their campaigns on LinkedIn. For three months we did LinkedIn prospecting, LinkedIn retargeting and paid paid search and we were able to generate quality leads for them. We then checked back in one year later after everything was live and they reported about a 10x return on their advertising spend. So it ended up working in terms of actually generating business for them. Now one thing I like to say here is that a lot of times when I give up principle, everybody is like, okay, we're all going to go and change all of our messaging to last frame because she said that in the conference. And I want to just say if you have a large enough audience, run the experiment to see what works for your audience and what doesn't. When we did this for a call center AI company, what we found was that there was actually differences in where the loss frame versus game frame worked. So actually the loss frame continued to work well at the higher level executive level, but with the more junior Personas, the gain frame worked. So if you're able to run the experiment, if you're not able to run the experiment on LinkedIn, at least go talk to five to 10 people that are your actual customers to engage what works best for them. All right, you guys know the drill by now. Are we ready for round two? Okay, that was like three. What the. I'm going to ask it one more time. I'd like to get us to 9.25. Are we ready for the next round? Okay, I'll take it. All right, our next solution or question is for an enterprise IT company, they do IT solutions and software. And the challenge that they had is a common challenge that we have in B2B marketing, which is that they were spending most of their marketing budget at events, but they were failing to generate a lot of qualified leads for their sales team. After the event. The common problem and the task at hand is how can we use behavioral science to motivate prospects that we meet at conferences to actually do a demo with our sales team after the conference. So option A is to use what's called regret lottery. Some people may have not. Does everybody know a regular lottery? Okay, cool. Does anybody know what a regret lottery is? Okay, cool. Nobody knows. We'll explain it. A regret lottery is actually similar to a traditional lottery, but then you add this element of loss or regret. The way that it works is that we basically told procecs here that, hey, we'll enter you in a lottery to win a brand new Tesla, but only if you complete a demo with our sales team. Does that make sense? The second option is use what's called pre commitment and then combine that with another behavioral science principle called hot state and I'll explain those and explain how we're thinking about it. So pre commitment is this tendency that we have as humans to basically make decisions that are better for our future selves right now. And so the idea with the pre commitment was to get prospects to basically pre commit to a demo at the event by filling out a mobile survey on their phone at the event. Then we combine that with what's called a hot state. And the idea with hot state or cold state is that basically people are much more likely to make a decision in a hot emotional state and than a cool state. So we right now in this room are all in a hot activated state because we came here intentionally. We're here to learn and network and every single day that passes after we leave this conference, we start getting cooler and cooler in terms of our tendency and motivation to want to change. So the goal here was how can we get the user when they're activated at the event to then fill out a form to sign up for a demo after the event. Third concept that we wanted to explore was this idea of time scarcity. And the general idea with time scarcity is that as humans, it's quite a powerful force in us where we tend to show greater desire when we learn that things are scarce. And if you're dealing a lot of times with people of different demographics, it could be time scarcity or financial scarcity. In this situation, what we're trying to do is say, hey, we're going to give you a clear deadline and a limited time to sign up up for these demos with our team and offer the fact that it's limited in nature. So I'm going to give you a minute and a half to Discuss options, and then we'll vote. All right, cool. You guys ready to see results? Votes in? Yeah. Cool. Pre commitment in a hot state. Wow. 70%. Okay, cool. So here's where I get to have my Oprah Winfrey moment. You're all winners. You're a winner, and you're a winner. And you're a winner because all three are correct. So we actually combined all three concepts. So here's how it worked. We wanted to get away from this idea of them spending money on trinkets and giveaways like notepads and whatnot at events, and instead took all of that budget that they were spending on that towards giving away one Tesla at the end of the year at VMworld, their biggest event. And so the entire year, we used this promotion and we were funneling leads to them, and then we had this massive drawing at VM World. Okay. So they didn't have to spend at every single event on trinkets and such. Not. So we wanted to use this, like, big lottery effect, knowing, and then tie it into this regret action of making sure that people did the vote. So the way the mechanics of it would work was people would come to an event, we would actually give them a quote that would only last for the day. So that's how we use time scarcity. We're saying we're giving you a code. It's going to only last for today, for you to use today on your mobile phone to schedule your consult with our sales team at some point in the future. And by doing that, you get entered into the lottery to win a Tesla. Here's the catch, though. You can't win if you haven't shown that you've completed the demo. There comes the regret part and there comes us closing the loop on getting them to do the actual demos. Because just coming in and scheduling on your mobile phone doesn't mean that you actually did a demo with the sales team. So once the sales team did a demo with you, then they would enter you in to have a chance to actually win the lottery. This ended up being so successful that we literally, their sales team, ran out of time of doing demos. So we started doing bigger group demos where multiple people could qualify at the same time. It ended up being their most successful marketing campaign in the history of the company. They actually won a Stevie Award for it, and we're so happy for them for that. And they were able to generate over 5,000 leads from this competition. It was so successful that they continued on with just different cars in the following years. So how is this relevant to you if you can't give away a Tesla? The other variations that we've done is taking instead of all the marketing budget the that's used on trinkets, we would get people to say that you could rent a Mini for a year, a Mini Cooper for a year. A lot less expensive than buying a Tesla. So there's ways that you can get creative in offering a higher value thing that people can use. All right, I think we're good to do our third round. If I don't get kicked off the stage, nobody's saying I'm going to get kicked off the stage. You guys ready for our third round? Okay, that's not fair because I haven't put the round slide on. When I do do that, I want a 10.65. I want us to go off the rector scale. Can we do that? All right, good. Okay, we're going to go now to the far end of the customer life cycle, which is customer retention. How can we use behavioral science to actually increase customer retention? So this client of ours is actually an educational technology startup. They didn't have an adoption challenge. They were actually in over 60% of the schools nationwide. Insane adoption. The problem was they were experiencing churn. People were buying the solution, not using it properly and then not renewing. So we needed to stop the bleeding. So here's the challenge. How do we make sure it school district managers who are our buyers, renew their software subscription. And the good news is because these are existing customers, we have their emails. So we're going to run our experiment on email. This is across tens of thousands of users. Again, they have great adoption, lots of customers and we're going to test a clarity. It's back again. So cognitive fluency and how we're testing it is in the language that we're using in the subject line and the body of the email, et cetera. We're just simply explaining what the dam software does. Yes. It's not rocket science. Just give it to me simply what is it that you do and why should I keep using it? The cognitive fluency. We've already covered this. B Pure social proof. So talk about how people like them are using this. Well, and this is based on a behavioral science principle called social proof. I'm sure every single marketing person knows this. We as humans are quite motivated by what others people around us do. There's actually three types of social proof that influences as humans. There's peer social proof, which is what we did in this case. So people like me Companies like me, other school districts like me, are using this solution successfully. There's expert social proof, people that I admire, influencers, et cetera, are doing this, and so should I. And there's numbers social proof, which is like, many people are doing it. Think of McDonald's. Billions and billions of people served. So we used peer social proof here to say, hey, your peers are doing it. And the third concept we're testing for is the endowment effect. And basically talking about the fact that you've already got all kinds of tech. And so that. But endowment effect is this idea that as humans, we basically value products and services that we already feel ownership to more than those that we don't. So the actual experiment in the lab that was done was they took a group of people, basically gave half the group of people a mug to hold for a period of time, and then asked what they would be willing to get paid for to part with it. And if you just merely held the cup of mug in your hand for more minutes than somebody else, you were willing to part with it for more dollars. So basically, the idea here is you already own this tech. You've already invested in this tech. You haven't used it successfully. Let us show you how you can use it successfully. All right, we got a minute on the clock, and your time starts now. All right, if you can hear me, clap your hands. Awesome. Let's vote. By the way, B is pure social proof. Okay, let's see what happened.
